Along with the increasing tension of spectrum resources, the communication industry puts forward an idea of applying a licence-free open frequency band, i.e., the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band for cellular mobile communication technology. The ISM frequency band bears various communication technologies due to its licence-free characteristic. Currently the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology is a most mainstream communication technology existing in the ISM frequency band throughout the world. The problem about how to implement ISM resource sharing between a future cellular mobile communication technology and WLAN without mutual interference is to be solved.
However, at present, a method for sharing a spectrum resource by two wireless communication technologies mainly relies on the Cognitive Radio technology. For example, a typical solution for spectrum resource sharing of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and WLAN is that:
1: if an LTE system is intended to use a spectrum resource of a frequency band F, detection on the F frequency band is started at first, and reception of a signal of the frequency band F is completed through a base station;
2: if no interference is found in the frequency band F, the frequency band F may be utilized by the LTE system for LTE transmission, and if interference is found in the frequency band F, the LTE system gives up; and
3: if a WLAN system is intended to use the spectrum resource of the frequency band F, an operating manner is similar to that of the above.
It can thus be seen that, solutions in a related technology require a base station to have a capability of detecting a target shared frequency band, and when a base station of a cellular network and a WLAN are inconsistent in coverage, a conventional art may cause inaccurate detection and a detection loss. For example, an LTE base station finds by detection that no WLAN occupies resources of a certain frequency band, but actually, some WLANs of a part of regions within coverage of the base station are occupying the spectrum resources of this band. Actually, the WLANs do not cover the location where the LTE base station is, so that a detection loss appears.
Therefore, it is necessary to provide a method, apparatus, terminal, and base station for detecting spectrum resource, which may avoid a detection loss for spectrum resource.